SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting
September 2, 2008
102nd Meeting
1. Roll Call:
2. The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, October 7, 2008. So, everyone mark their calendar.
3. Is there any other Old Business or New Business that we should take care of before moving on?
4. The next meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society will be on Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 10:30 A. M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The speaker for the September meeting will be Jim Faulkinbury who will talk on Naturalization Records. Jim is a professional genealogist with over 40 years experience and a specialist in California research. He will explain how to get the most information out of complex, ever-changing, invaluable Naturalization Records. On his online Website, which is http://www.wfgenresearch.com/index.html you will find Jim has extracted 61,000 plus indexed entries of foreign-born voters from California’s Great Registers of Voters in 1872. There is also a 335,000 plus index of vital statistics extracted fro the San Francisco Morning Call Newspaper for the years 1869-1900. Jim will present valuable information that we all can use in researching our immigrant ancestors. This should be a very interesting meeting, and all are invited. You do not have to be a member to attend the meetings. Try it, you will like it! If you are at all interested in Genealogy, you will enjoy the meetings that are put on by this society.
5. As I reported last month, the San Mateo County Genealogical Society passed a resolution at their July meeting to actively engage in a contractual agreement with La Cañada College to have their library housed in the library at La Cañada College. This was a great achievement and thrill for everyone, because the group has been working on this move for almost 10 years. The vote was unanimous. On July 22, 2008 the following SMCGS members met with Dave Patterson, Reference Librarian at Cañada to begin negotiating a contract. The negotiating team from SMCGS were Jean Ann Caroll, Dick Laughlin, Mel Pratt, Bob Shoemaker, Diane Smelker, and Cath Trindle. Maybe Bob can add something more to this.
6. As I have also reported before, the San Mateo County Genealogical Society is planning their fall Seminar on November 8, 2008. The date had to be changed, and it is now November 15, 2008 instead. Please adjust your schedule accordingly. The featured speaker will be Paula Stuart-Warren, who is a nationally known Certified Genealogist and Genealogy Lecturer. Paula is a columnist for Ancestry.com, is a winner of the Distinguished Service Award from the Minnesota Genealogical Society, and the Award of Merit from the Federation of Genealogy Societies. She coauthored the best-selling book “Your Guide to the Family History Library”. Her website is www.paulastuartwarren.blogspot.com for those who are interested. They have now finalized the topics on which the speakers will be speaking and they are: “Though they were poor, they have been rich in Records”, “The Three R’s, Reading, Writing, and Research in School Records”, “The WPA Era, What it created for Genealogists”, and “Where are those Records they told me to Check?”. The cost for nonmembers is $30.00 and lunch is $8.00, for a total of $38.00. It is a well worth while event to attend, so I will expect everyone to attend. (Hand out Reservation Forms). I am handing out the appropriate forms for each of you to fill out and mail in, so you will have no excuse for not attending. All the information about the Seminar and where it is to be held is on the back of the form. It will be held at the First Presbyterian Church at 25th Avenue and Hacienda Avenue in San Mateo.
7. For those of you who are just dying to get more Genealogical information, the National Genealogical Society will be having their conference in Raleigh, North Carolina next year on May 13 to the 16, 2009. I know that everyone here missed the National Meeting that was held in May of this year, so here is your chance to make up for it. There were 1,600 attendees at the meeting last May, so it was considered a very successful conference. There were 50 speakers who presented exceptionally high-quality programs. The topic of the conference for next year is “The Building of a Nation from Roanoke to the West.”. This is the 31st National Genealogical Society Conference in the States and Family History Fair. The conference will take place in the brand new Raleigh Covnention Center, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Hotel accommodations are in the adjoining Marriott Hotel or nearby at the Sheraton Hotel. For more detailed information, go to the website http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/. Additional information will be announced as it becomes available
8. Lat month we talked a little bit about Spell Checker which is on everyone’s computer. Rick Dusine brought up an interesting point that I missed and did not discuss at that time and that is because I had not researched it. Rick noted that on the Options Menu, which is obtained by clicking on “Options” on the Menu Bar, and then clicking on the “Spelling & Grammar” tab, there is a button that is titled “Custom Dictionaries”. We thought at that time this would bring up the main dictionary that housed all the words in the English language which Spell Checker uses for checking the spelling on the documents that are created in Word. We also thought that we could eliminate or add to any word in this list that one wishes, so as not to overload the dictionary. However, the list that pops up is only a list of the dictionaries that one has created throughout one’s work in Word. The master dictionary is buried elsewhere in Word program and is more or less untouchable. In other words, if one was to find it, it is better to leave it alone so as not to mess things up. In the list that does pop up, there is a dictionary titled “CUSTOM.DIC(default)”. This is the dictionary that Word has created automatically for you where all the words that one wishes to have added to one’s master dictionary. The dictionaries are kept separate for any of a number of reasons. Words get placed into this dictionary whenever one presses the button titled “Add to Dictionary”. It does not add words to the Master Dictionary. You can also create a special dictionary for any document that one is writing, and label it accordingly. Before you can use the special dictionary for any particular document, you must change the new dictionary to the default dictionary, which is done by just pressing the appropriate buttons on the right hand side.
9. Before proceeding into the video demonstration which Don Brozzo I have arrange, I thought I would go into my closing remarks so we would have more time to spend on the video demonstration.
10. In closing, I thought it would be interesting if I read the following short article to you regarding a rendition of a well know psalm. Thanks to John Young for finding this for me. Maybe some of you have already heard it. The title of it is “The Democrats are my Shepherd”.
11. And finally, I would like to read this article entitled “A Dying Man’s Dream”.
12. This month we are going to do something different. Don Brozzo has been willing to assist me in showing some examples of my genealogy on Family Tree Maker by using his computer and projection equipment and the Silicon Valley Foundation’s screen. This is a little experimental, so please bear with us.
a. First we will open Family Tree Maker to show what it looks like when you click on the icon to open your program up. For any Genealogy program there will be an icon somewhere on your desktop that one can click on to open the program up. For this particular demonstration, I must select the correct file from a list of files to open up my program. This is not what you would ordinarily have to do.
b. What pops up on one’s screen is the family page for some selected individual, such as yourself. The family page that will pop up each time you open up the program will be the same family page that you closed out the program with when you turned the program off.
c. The arrangement of the Family Page from most all Genealogy Programs is about the same. The husband, along with his various statistics, is on the left-hand side and the wife’s is on the right-hand side. The statistics will show the date of one’s birth, where he or she was born, the date or his or her death if applicable, and where they died.
d. On the next line down, it will show the date at which the two parents were married and where they were married.
e. The list at the bottom of the page will list all the children of these parents, starting with the eldest at the top and progressing to the youngest at the bottom. It will also give such statistical information for each child as to their sex, their birth date, place of birth, their death date, and the place where they died. Each one of these children will have their own Family Page, which will show who they married and a list of their children. One may go to the Family Page for each of these individuals by pressing the button with the arrow on it just to the left of the child’s name. The purpose of defining the sex of each child, is so that the Family page that is created automatically when the child’s name and statistical date is entered, is so the child is oriented correctly in their own Family Page as to whether he or she is male or female.
f. By pressing the long button at the top of the page which states “Parents of George Lee”, and on the button itself it states “Wilbert Daniel & Eulaia Catherine”, will take you directly to the Family Page of my parents, Wilbert Daniel Henderson and Eulalia Catherine Alley. The same button above my wife’s name will take one directly to the Family Page for her parents.
g. There are several other features on this Family Page one should become familiar with, in order to give a complete background information to each individual. First, there is a row of four buttons below each parent. The first on the left is the “Edit” button, which when pressed will bring up a dialogue box with five tabs, which labeled “General”, “Facts”, “Notes”, “Medical”, and “Address”. The General tab gives a little more information than that which is on the Family Page. The Facts tab gives a list of the most important events that occurred in this person’s life time, such as date of birth, graduation from highschool and college, etc. The Notes tab is probably the most valuable one where one can place notes about the individual when they become available or are discovered. I use it primarily for placing one’s biography. It is not the best place for keeping a biography, but it is the only place they have it in this program. I personally keep one’s finished biography in a Microsoft’s Word document which is in a much nicer looking form. The Medical Tab is probably not used much, since this type of information is mostly confidential. However, it can be used if one wishes. The last tab is the Address Tab which may be useful under some conditions. If one is communicating with someone about genealogy data, this would be a nice place to have their address, phone number, E-Mail, etc., especially if you didn’t have it located elsewhere in your computer.
h. The next button is the “Spouse” button. This button is used if one had more than one spouse in one’s lifetime. By clicking on this button will give a list of the spouses that one has accumulate in one’s lifetime. By clicking on any one of these spouses will bring up the Family Page with that particular spouse along with the children that were created by this spouse. Therefore, there should be a Family Page for each spouse along with their children, so there is no mixup of the children between which child belonged to what spouce.
i. The next button is the Scrapbook Button. This is where one keeps one’s pictures that apply to a particular person. The amount one can store here is probably endless.
j. The last button is the Web Search Resources, which is too lengthy to be discussed at this time.
k. There is a button on the right-hand side of each husband and wife, which is a very important button. The is the Source Button. By clicking on this button will bring up a dialogue box which tells you where the information that is on the Family Page came from. This information one must fill out after the information on the Family Page is entered. This is an extremely important step to take when entering genealogy information, because many years later one would forget where the information came from unless it was noted somewhere.
l. By clicking on the seventh button from the left on the Tool Bar, will give a list of Tree Charts that one can make of anyone’s family. For this case I will select my Great Great Great Grandfather, Donald Henderson I, to give you an example of what The Family Tree Maker program can construct. This chart is made automatically by the Family Tree Program each time you ask to look at it. Therefore, any additions or corrections that you have made to the program will also be included.
13. I have placed all of my meeting discussions onto the SIR’s Website in case you would like to refer to some of them. In the Genealogy Group on the Website, scroll down until you see the title “Monthly Genealogy Meetings”. Under this title you will see the dates of our past meetings. Click on any one of these dates and you will see the discussions that we talked about at each of these meetings. I have changed the format at this point a little, and have placed all the Monthly Genealogy Meetings for 2007 into a single folder titled “2007 Genealogy Meetings”. The monthly meetings for 2008 will be shown individually until the end of the year, and they also will be placed in a 2008 folder. This will save a great deal of space and make it much easier to look up the meetings.